FOR MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE, MY JOB WAS TO BE A WOMAN. In the fall of 2020, I quit my job. I was a feminist author from the blog era, the beneficiary of a brief, strange trend that allowed anyone with an internet connection and a sufficient number of hot takes to declare themselves a Feminist Expert. I had a clear and coherent and highly rehearsed persona, and I had several centuries of previous feminist writing to guide me every time I sat down to write.
I knew the issues and how to convey them, and what important things had already been said or written about them. Some people called me a manhating identitarian boner-killer, and some people called me a heroic strong-female-character girlboss, but all of those people knew what box to put me in and where I fit in their world. It made sense. I made sense—at least, I did to everyone but me. I firmly meant everything I said about feminism and misogyny and the necessity of smashing the patriarchy, and I stand by it. Yet I understood, on some deep-down level, that I was more miserable about being a woman than any woman I had ever met. In time, I realized that my misery had a name, and that I could end it. I came out publicly as nonbinary, then as trans, then as a nonbinary trans man. And then, suddenly, nothing about me made sense anymore.
“When you fail at being a woman so hard you decide to transition into a man, you don’t get to comment anymore on feminism, femininity, or motherhood. You canceled your membership, dude.”
“I also like how she opted out of being a woman but still wants people to acknowledge that she’s oppressed.”
“It also strikes me as intensely treacherous to be a feminist and then become a guy.”
I collected internet comments like this for years after my transition. I found them everywhere. You could write all these people off as bigots—they mostly are—but the confusion followed me into my real life, into my relationships with readers and friends. Cis women I had known for decades dropped out of my life after my transition. “I felt so empowered to embrace my feminine strength [because of your book],” wrote one woman, “and seeing you choosing a masculine pronoun instead of a feminine one left me a bit puzzled.”
Whether people loved me or hated me, whether they reviled me openly or quietly turned away, the message was the same: I had left feminism. I had left womanhood. I had abandoned my post, and I had let everybody down.
To me, though, it seemed clear that my transition was the most feminist thing I had done in my life, and perhaps the only feminist action that was truly aimed at liberation from patriarchal gender rather than slowly chipping away at the worst parts of patriarchy to make them livable.
Wow! eBook
